The Death Sculptor (42 page)

Both Hunter and Garcia knew that prostitution and drugs were like twin sisters.

Jude looked down at her hands. ‘Her desperation wasn’t for drugs. At least not the usual drugs.’

Hunter looked intrigued.

‘She told me she had a kid who was ill. She needed money for medicine. She was really scared for her kid. She said that she only needed to do it that once, maybe two nights, and she’d have enough for her kid’s medicine.’ Jude shook her head as if trying to erase the memory. ‘Anyway, I gave her a few tips and we went back to my corner spot.’

‘OK,’ Garcia said. ‘What about her?’

‘Well, later that night I got an easy job down a back alley – twenty minutes. When I was walking back, I saw her jumping into a car. She waved as they drove past me, and that was when I saw the driver. It was Rhinoceros Man. I tried waving them down, but they were too fast.’

‘And what happened?’ Hunter asked.

‘I don’t know. She didn’t come back that night.’ Jude shrugged. ‘She didn’t come back any night after that, either. At least not to my corner. I was a little worried. I thought that maybe what happened to me had happened to her. The same four bastards ganged up on her. As I said, it took me a week to be able to hit the streets again after they were done with me, and I was much stronger than she was. I never saw her again. But maybe she quit after that night. I hope she did. She said she only needed to do it that one night. Or maybe she got scared. It happened a lot to the new girls. As soon as they encountered their first rough customer, and inevitably they all did, that was when they figured out that that life wasn’t for them. After that, I never saw Rhinoceros Man or any of his friends again.’

Hunter was still intrigued. ‘Did this Roxy girl ever tell you her kid’s name?’ he asked.

‘She probably did, but there’s no way I will remember it now. That was twenty-eight years ago.’ Jude got up to leave again.

Hunter got up with her and handed her a card. ‘If you remember anything else, any of the names of the others in that group, could you please give me a call – anytime.’

Jude stared at Hunter’s card as if it were poisonous. After a long, hesitating moment she took it, and walked out of the café.

The only thought in Hunter’s mind was that he’d been wrong. The shadow image they’d got from Andrew Nashorn’s boat didn’t depict a fight. It depicted a sexual attack – a gang rape.

It was past ten at night by the time Hunter got back to his apartment. Sleep didn’t come. His brain just wouldn’t disconnect. Instead of forcing it, he went back to the box of photographs he’d retrieved from Littlewood’s apartment and spread them on the floor of his living room. He checked them against the portrait Allison had given him of her parents. He already knew that the victims knew each other, but if Derek Nicholson were in any of those pictures, then maybe the missing fourth member of the group was too.

After an hour on his knees with a magnifying glass, Hunter had got nothing. He felt tired. His legs hurt and he needed rest. His eyes were burning from fatigue and his neck and shoulders ached. But his brain still wouldn’t let go.

He heard the couple next door come back in from another night out drinking, slamming doors and slurring their words.

‘I need to get some new neighbors,’ Hunter chuckled to himself. He turned his attention to the photographs of the shadow images. All the information he had come across in the past few hours was bouncing around inside his head.

Giggling and moans started coming through the wall. ‘Oh, no, no,’ Hunter whispered. ‘Please, not in the living room.’

The moans got a little louder.

‘Damn!’ Hunter knew that the banging against the wall would start soon. He laced his fingers and placed his palms on the top of his head while his eyes returned to the images on the floor.

The more he thought about it, the more it made sense. Nicholson, Nashorn, Littlewood and whoever the fourth member of their group was, had sexually attacked somebody. It could’ve been the girl Jude told them about – Roxy – or some other street prostitute. But what had happened to their victim? Had the attack gone terribly wrong? Was she dead?

The loud noises coming from next door didn’t bother Hunter anymore. He was in his own bubble now, mentally reviewing every piece of information relating to the case.

He was so absorbed in his thoughts that it took Hunter a few seconds to register the sound of a phone ringing. He blinked twice and searched the room, as if momentarily disorientated. His cellphone was on the improvised computer desk, by the printer. The phone rang again and Hunter snapped it up without checking the caller-display window.

‘Detective Hunter.’

‘Detective, it’s Jude. We talked earlier today.’

‘Yes, of course.’ Hunter was surprised, but his tone gave nothing away.

‘I’m sorry for calling so late, but I did remember something, and though I thought about calling tomorrow morning, it has been bugging me and I can’t sleep. You said that if I remembered anything else, I could call at any time.’

‘Yes, of course. It’s no problem at all,’ Hunter said, checking his watch. ‘What did you remember?’

‘A name.’

The muscles on Hunter’s neck tensed. ‘The fourth member of the group?’

‘No. I told you, I never heard any of the other names that night.’ A short pause. ‘I remember the name of Roxy’s kid. Remember I told you that she mentioned it once or twice?’

‘Yes, yes.’

Jude told Hunter the name and he frowned. Unusual, but at the same time there was something familiar about it.

Jude disconnected, glad to have called, and hoping that her brain would now disengage and allow her to get some sleep.

Hunter placed his cellphone back on the desk. The name Jude had given him was swimming around in his head. He decided to run it against the LAPD database. Maybe that’s why it sounded vaguely familiar.

Hunter switched his laptop on, and as he waited for it to boot up, his eyes went back to the mess of photographs and files on the floor. He paused as he felt a cold swirl whip around inside his stomach.

There was no need to search the LAPD database. He’d just remembered where he’d heard the name before.

Hunter didn’t sleep. He spent the rest of the night exhausting his memory, searching for more clues. Even the possibility that he was right scared him.

He had to drop by either Olivia or Allison Nicholson’s house to obtain one last piece of information, but it was too early to go knocking on anyone’s door. He reached for his cellphone and dialed Alice’s number. She answered it on the third ring.

‘Robert, is everything OK?’ She sounded half asleep.

‘I need a favor.’

‘Um . . . OK. What do you need?’

‘Can you hack into the California Department of Social Services’ database?’

A confused pause.

‘Yeah, that won’t be very hard.’

‘Can you do it now, from your house?’

‘Sure, as soon as I power up my gear.’ A new pause. ‘You do realize that you are asking me to commit a felony, right?’

‘I promise I won’t tell anyone.’

Alice laughed. ‘Hey, you don’t have to convince me. This is what I do best.’

‘OK then, here’s what I need you to find out.’

Olivia Nicholson was about to have breakfast when Hunter knocked on her door. Without giving much away, he explained that they had come across some new information overnight, and he just needed to ask her a few more questions.

Their conversation was brief, but fruitful. She told him that, as far as she could remember, her father’s oldest friend was Dwayne Bradley, the Los Angeles District Attorney.

It was late afternoon when the phone on Garcia’s desk rang. He hadn’t seen or heard from Hunter all day, but that wasn’t uncommon.

‘Detective Garcia, Homicide Special,’ he answered, and listened in silence for several seconds.

His expression took on such a deep frown that his forehead looked like a tire print. ‘You’re kidding . . . Where? . . . Are you sure? . . . OK, stay put, keep your eye on the house, and if anything changes call me straight away.’ Garcia disconnected, and ran down to Captain Blake’s office. Five minutes later he was dialing Hunter’s cellphone number. Hunter answered it on the first ring.

‘Robert, where are you?’

‘Sitting in my car, waiting, gambling on a hunch.’

‘What? What hunch?’

‘Too complicated to explain now.’ Hunter had already picked up the anxiety in Garcia’s voice. ‘What have you got?’

‘You’re not going to believe this. One of our teams hit the jackpot. We’ve got a solid lead on Ken Sands. Apparently he’s been working for an Albanian drug outfit. We have a positive lock on his present location.’

‘Where?’

‘Somewhere in Pomona. I’ve got the address here with me.’

Pomona was way out of town.

‘We’ve got a green light from the captain,’ Garcia said. ‘A search warrant is being pushed through the courts as we speak.’

‘How fast can we get a SWAT team in place?’

‘Five to ten minutes to get a team deployed. I already have someone getting me all the information on the location, including architectural drawings. We’ll probably be able to brief the SWAT captain in fifteen, twenty minutes max.’

Hunter consulted his watch. ‘I won’t make the briefing, Carlos. I’m on the other side of town, and rush hour started twenty minutes ago. Give me the address in Pomona and I’ll meet you there.’

Hunter disconnected, and at that exact moment the car he’d been following all day started moving again.

‘Damn,’ he said, turning the key in his ignition and stepping on the gas.

The windowless room was located at the basement of the PAB. Five SWAT-team members were sitting two-by-two in school classroom formation, with the fifth member sitting by himself at the back. They were all wearing black fatigues and bulletproof vests with the word ‘SWAT’ spray-painted across the back. Their black helmets were resting on their desks. At the front of the room, their captain, Jack Fallon, was standing behind a podium. Garcia and Captain Blake were to his left.

‘Listen up, gents,’ Fallon said in a commanding voice. The room went absolutely still. He pressed a button and Ken Sands’s latest photograph, the one Hunter had obtained from the prison board, was projected onto the white screen to his right. ‘This charming individual goes by the name of Ken Sands,’ Fallon continued. ‘This is the last known picture we have of him, taken six months ago on the day of his release from the California State Prison in Lancaster.’

‘Looks like a regular scumbag to me, Cap,’ Lewis Robinson, one of the SWAT agents said, causing all the others to laugh.

‘That might be,’ Fallon said, sucking their attention back to him. ‘And that’s why we’re here. Sands is a major suspect in a multiple-homicide investigation. His record shows that he’s very violent, very dangerous, and apparently very intelligent. There’s a good chance that he’s the Sculptor serial killer we’ve all read about in the papers.’

An uneasy murmur broke out among the agents.

‘Which means I don’t even have to tell you how royally disturbed that makes him.’ Fallon pressed the button again and the image on the screen changed to the blueprint of a single-story house. ‘This is our target’s location in Pomona. Our intel tells us he’s inside at the moment.’

The blueprint showed a house with three bedrooms, one of them en-suite, a living room, a dining room, a bathroom, and a large kitchen.

‘Is he alone in the house, Cap?’ Neil Grimshaw, the youngest of the SWAT agents, asked. Grimshaw had joined the team only a week ago. This was his first major operation. He looked tense, but in control.

‘It looks like he’s got at least one other person in there with him,’ Fallon replied and looked at Garcia.

‘That’s the intel we’ve got so far,’ Garcia explained. ‘There’s an LAPD detective watching the house as we speak, trying to gather whatever new info he can.’

‘Do we know if this other person is hostile?’ Robinson asked.

‘We don’t know,’ Garcia replied.

‘Are they armed?’

‘We don’t know.’

‘Do we know which room the target is in?’

‘We don’t have that intel.’

‘Fuck, is this guessing day, or what?’ Robinson said. ‘Might as well walk in there blindfolded. So what
do
we know?’

‘All the information we have is in the folders on your desks,’ Fallon cut in. ‘That’s what we have, that’s what we’ll work with. That’s why we are SWAT. Is that a problem, Robinson?’

‘Just a bit worried about walking into any environment with an uncertain number of hostiles, having
zero
intel on their firepower, and next to zero on everything else, Cap, that’s all.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ Fallon said, as if addressing a two-year-old. ‘I didn’t mean to scare you. Would you like to sit this one out, shaky-shorts? We can call you when we go looking for the marshmallow monster in the cupcake factory. That won’t be very dangerous, I promise.’

The room burst out into laughter.

‘OK, we all better be on our toes on this one,’ Fallon carried on. The room went quiet again. ‘Sands has been linked to an Albanian drug outfit, and we all know what that crowd is capable of. We’re taking no risks. We’re going in guns first. I want three teams of two, double-back formation – usual partners. Grimshaw, you’re with me. We’ve got surprise on our side. Sands doesn’t know we’re coming for him tonight, so we’ve gotta act fast. Let’s pack it up, gents. We’ve got a scumbag to take down.’

Dusk had taken over Los Angeles and the wind had picked up considerably by the time they reached Pomona. The house in question was at the end of an isolated road, in a quiet neighborhood. SWAT, together with Garcia and two other police cars, parked at the top of the road and went the rest of the way on foot. At the moment their most powerful weapon was the surprise factor. The last thing they wanted to do was to give away that advantage by alerting the house occupants to their presence.